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This week, a credit service in India called Creditseva suffered a data breach which exposed details of some 48,000 citizens – including driver’s licenses, home addresses and credit reports. The company was notified by Kromtech security researchers of the breach when they noticed the information on an insecure Amazon S3 bucket.

Why are banks being targeted?

Willie Sutton, infamous U.S. bank robber was once asked, “Why do you rob banks?” His response: “Because that’s where the money is.” Though this may seem banal and obvious, it gets right to the point. Banks not only have trillions in standard currency, but oceans of personal information. Financial markets are like oxygen. Their adequate provision is required for the whole system to work. This leads billions of people and millions of companies to use financial services (banks) – that’s a stupefying amount of personal information.

If you are a cybercriminal, you dramatically increase your return on investment when you target organizations with the deepest cistern of personal data. The attack may be unsuccessful, but the payoff is so alluring that attackers will continue to put financial services at the top of any list.

How can companies mitigate against such attacks?

What happened to Creditseva is yet another instance of an unforeseen, unknown threat leading to a catastrophic breach. Not only is Creditseva’s reputation (and corporate viability) at stake, but 48,000 regular people will be anxiously monitoring their personal information against identity fraud – for years to come.

Thieves will often auction illegally obtained personal information on the Dark Web. And buyers could do anything with this information, including a hold strategy to use when the timing is most advantageous.

What can companies do? First, let us see how the breach was first discovered. Krometech, who specializes in hunting for threats, was the first to notify Creditseva of the breach. Did you see that? Krometech was “hunting.”

Threat hunting is the iterative process of searching through network and security data to discover threats that evade traditional defenses. Now, Krometech’s hunt was more akin to discovering there is a moon in the night sky, but the principle is universal: Threat hunting is the surest way to find threats in an ever-evolving world. But to begin threat hunting, organizations must adopt a new paradigm: the assumption of compromise.

It does not require a super-elite cybersecurity specialist, only an open mind and frictionless access to data for discovering threats.

In the case of Creditseva’s AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service), settings allowed public access, leaving it open to anyone accessing Creditseva’s customer data. To get a sense of how open this “public” setting is…anyone can, almost, effortlessly go to Creditseva’s AWS S3 bucket from a personal browser – like hitting your favorite news site or cooking blog.

When cloud infrastructure is deployed, it is often to satisfy a pressing concern (e.g. application development, on-demand storage, etc). Having a CISB gives organizations security policy that will govern current and future cloud systems, without needing to manipulate each new instance. With this, companies have security that conforms to policy, regulations and governance with the agility necessary to satisfy the business demand.

Events

Webinars

Traditional security models are all about the current state – but in the current state of cyber-security, by the time new rules are written, they’re obsolete. Resources have changed, topologies have shifted, traffic has evolved, and applications grew new arms and legs.

Most organizations that I talk to still have their networks designed for 90's era attacks. A hard perimeter and little to nothing on the inside. The one common exception is the part of the network that processes credit card data since PCI DSS specifically identifies the Cardholder Data Network (CDN) and requires controls around it.

Join David Monahan, managing research director at leading IT analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), and discover the difference between organizations using an SPOA solution to manage their firewall environments versus those not using one of these solutions.

Using Security Policy And Automation (SPOA) Tools To Reduce The Attack Surface

Attack surfaces have expanded greatly in the past several years, in part because of the amount of new applications coming online via Internet of Things and increasingly connected technology. Organizations have an admittedly tough time keeping up with all the new touchpoints and the rapid expansion of the attack surface. Complete defense is nearly impossible, and many companies struggle with visibility issues, mismatched or misaligned firewall policies, and an inability to comprehensively test the security configurations they do have

Cloud technology gives enterprises faster application deployment, instant storage, workload versatility and pricing models that decrease initial capital investment. It is no wonder enterprises are making the move to the cloud.

Migrations run the risk of cost overrun, delays and disruption of network service - often due to a lack of personnel and process to efficiently and effectively manage. To ensure a successful migration, consider these four key factors: 1) identifying and removing technical mistakes, 2) removing unused access, 3) refining and organizing what remains and 4) continuous, real-time monitoring.

Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) continues to be a difficult practice for organizations the world over. In the last 20 years, network security policies (e.g. firewall rules) have grown by more than 3,500%. Yes, you read that number correctly. Why is that?

Gartner research has uncovered a number of security policy challenges for enterprises. Among these challenges are the typical assessments necessary to fortify policy for compliance and improved security posture.

Welcome to the world of overflowing regulations and compliance standards, of evolving infrastructure and the ever-present breach. It's a world where 72% of security and compliance personnel say their jobs are more difficult today than just two years ago.

Firewall technology has come a long way since its initial, most rudimentary forms. Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) are the latest development, and organizations are accelerating adoption to the new technology. But NGFWs aren’t a fix-all solution.

Forrester’s Zero Trust Model of information security helps teams develop robust prevention, detection and incident response capabilities to protect their company's vital digital business ecosystem. This report will help security pros understand the technologies best suited to empowering and extending their Zero Trust initiatives and will detail how Forrester sees this model and framework growing and evolving.

The customer sought a data analysis tool to correlate application data with network and security data to spot service-impacting anomalies. They did not have an accurate picture of interoperability between applications and the underlying infrastructure.

This national insurance provider had three problems to tackle regarding their firewall policies. First, the number of rules under management was overwhelming staff and processes. They needed to increase visibility and effectiveness of their firewall change request/workflow ticketing process. And they also need help maintaining compliance PCI DSS requirements.

Each time this Global MSP engaged a new customer, they had to onboard the firewalls – sometimes hundreds per engagement – into their network. Part of the onboarding process required assessing the policies against internal best practices – a manual, line-by-line process that took an average of 16 hours/firewall and was extremely error-prone.